Here is the most useful accident in Dan Fogelberg’s career. In 1978, Fogelberg set out to make an album with — his own stated goal — no commercial aspirations whatsoever: an experimental, mostly instrumental duet record with jazz flutist Tim Weisberg, full of bossa nova, guitar etudes and orchestral pieces. Then the album’s grand closing number collapsed in the studio because the piano had been recorded out of tune with the orchestra, fixing it would cost too much, and Fogelberg went home and banged out a replacement song in a day or two. The replacement was “The Power of Gold.” It became a Top 25 hit, peaking at No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 in December 1978, dragged its parent album to No. 8 and double platinum, and taught Dan Fogelberg the lesson that shaped the next five years of his life: he could write for the radio whenever he chose to. He just usually chose not to.
The irony is built into the song itself. “The Power of Gold” is a warning about money — about what success does to the people it touches, about balancing the cost of the soul you lost against the dreams you lightly sold. Fogelberg wrote a critique of materialism in a hurry, to fill a hole in an album, and material success is exactly what it brought him. He knew it, too. In a chat on his official website, quoted by Parade, he explained the song’s origin with a wry honesty: “Actually, the song was a response to the growing materialism in my own life, and that of many of my successful colleagues — I won’t mention any names.”
Two Musicians, One Resemblance
The partnership began, as so many good ones do, with a guest spot. Tim Weisberg was a Los Angeles jazz flutist with a solo career stretching back to the turn of the decade — his session work went back as far as The Monkees Present in 1969 — when Fogelberg brought him in to play on Nether Lands (1977), Fogelberg’s lush, orchestral fourth album. Weisberg’s flute graced the track “Give Me Some Time,” and the chemistry was obvious enough that when Fogelberg decided his next record would be something entirely different, Weisberg was the call.
According to Paul Zollo’s sleeve notes for the 1997 retrospective Portrait: The Music of Dan Fogelberg, Fogelberg wanted the follow-up to Nether Lands to be “completely about music, without any commercial aspirations whatsoever,” and he invited Weisberg to make it a duet. Fogelberg said as much himself at the time, in a statement quoted in the Baltimore Sun: “This album constitutes a collaboration, experimental in nature, between Tim and myself. It is an attempt for both of us to move outside our own recognizable boundaries and try new directions.” The title came from a joke about their appearance: both men wore their hair long and their beards full, and people kept mistaking them for brothers. Twin Sons of Different Mothers — two musicians who looked like siblings and sounded like opposite poles, the introspective folk-rock songwriter and the airy jazz flutist, meeting in the middle.
The album they made, released in August 1978 on Full Moon/Epic, kept the promise of experimentation. Across its ten tracks there is a minute-and-a-half “Twins Theme,” a “Guitar Etude No. 3,” a seven-minute workout on the Hollies’ “Tell Me to My Face,” a cover of Judy Collins’s “Since You’ve Asked,” and instrumentals with names like “Hurtwood Alley” and “Lahaina Luna.” Fogelberg, the supposed frontman, sang lead on only three tracks. Weisberg’s flute is the album’s presiding voice. It was, by design, a beautiful detour — and then the detour needed an ending.
The Closer That Collapsed
The planned finale was, in Fogelberg’s own words, a “big, huge grandiose symphonic piece.” They recorded the entire track. Only afterward did anyone discover the fatal flaw: the piano was out of tune with the orchestra. The piece could be salvaged only by redoing it, at a cost nobody wanted to pay. Fogelberg retold the story in an interview with Performing Songwriter, quoted by Parade: “I went home thinking that that wasn’t what we needed to end that album with. We needed something that rocked. And we had already done most of the album. So I remember just going home and banging this thing out in a day or two and calling Tim and saying, ‘Let’s cut this other track.’ And we did it, threw it on there, and the next thing you know, it was on the radio.”
The track they cut is a small masterpiece of economy. “The Power of Gold” runs 4:34, carried by Fogelberg’s piano and guitars, Weisberg’s flute threading through the arrangement, Jim Keltner on drums, Norbert Putnam on bass and Joe Lala on congas. Lending the chorus its lift is a voice radio listeners knew well: Don Henley of the Eagles, an old friend from the Los Angeles singer-songwriter circle, singing harmony vocals, with Florence Warner on backing vocals. And Fogelberg’s lyric aims straight at the world he and Henley now inhabited — the world where the dreams get sold and the ledger of the soul has to be balanced. He later admitted to Performing Songwriter that it was “one of the few things that I’ve written specifically for radio that worked.” Written in a day or two, aimed at the radio, warning against the very gold it was about to earn. The song contains its own punchline.
The Hit Nobody Planned
Fogelberg did not wait around to watch it happen. Per Zollo’s account, he fully expected the critics to savage the album, so before its release he flew to Europe with friends to be out of range. He was there when the excited call came from his manager, Irving Azoff: the album had gone Top 20. There was, Fogelberg decided, no sense in fighting it. He flew home and went straight into the studio to begin work on the songs for his next album, Phoenix — the record that would make him a superstar.
The critics, for the record, were kinder than he feared. Cash Box praised the album for blending “the folk-rock, guitar flavored elements of Fogelberg’s music with Weisberg’s more airy, free-spirited, flute laden sound,” and singled out “The Power of Gold” as a standout. Dave DiMartino, in a Billboard Books history, called the single the product of an interesting collaboration and “an experiment that worked.” The dissenters were there too — Dave Marsh, in The New Rolling Stone Record Guide, dismissed the pairing as smooth cocktail-lounge fare — but the public had already voted. The single climbed to No. 24 on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking on December 9, 1978, and No. 23 on the Cash Box Top 100; it reached No. 51 in Canada, and in Britain it scraped to No. 59 — modest, except that it remains Fogelberg’s only entry on the UK Singles Chart. The album outran the single: No. 8 on the Billboard 200, No. 7 on the Cash Box album chart, and eventually certified double platinum by the RIAA — Fogelberg’s first platinum album, and the only one of Weisberg’s career.
Context makes the achievement stranger. Before “The Power of Gold,” Fogelberg had exactly one Top 40 hit to his name, “Part of the Plan” in 1975. He was a respected album artist whom the industry considered a cult taste — too literary for pop radio, too soft for rock radio. The duet album was supposed to confirm that status in the most elegant way possible. Instead it handed him his biggest success yet and, worse, proved he could do the commercial thing essentially on demand, in 48 hours, as a salvage job. The whole imperial phase that followed — Phoenix, “Longer,” The Innocent Age, the run of Top 10 singles in 1980 and 1981 — starts in that moment, with a singer in Europe answering a telephone and finding out that the throwaway had become the headline.
Seventeen Years Later
The twins did eventually reunite. In 1995, Fogelberg and Weisberg released a second collaboration, No Resemblance Whatsoever — the title now the joke, since both men appeared on the cover in the same pose as 1978 but with short hair and clean-shaven faces, looking nothing alike. The record company, Weisberg recalled in an interview with Vinyl Confessions quoted by Parade, “gave up on it after the first three weeks,” and the album failed to chart. Weisberg’s verdict was generous anyway: “musically, it’s a diamond in the rough that a lot of Dan’s fans never heard about, and mine too.”
But the first collaboration had one more surprise in it. In 2001, the French electronic duo Daft Punk, working with producer Todd Edwards, built their track “Face to Face,” from the album Discovery, out of samples of three Twin Sons tracks — “Twins Theme,” “Tell Me to My Face” and “Lahaina Luna.” The experimental album with no commercial aspirations ended up sampled on one of the most celebrated dance records ever made, which is perhaps the most Fogelberg-Weisberg outcome imaginable: the detour outlasted the highway.
Dan Fogelberg died on December 16, 2007, almost exactly 29 years after “The Power of Gold” reached its chart peak. The song remains the hinge of his story — the moment the most private songwriter of his generation discovered, by accident and against his stated intentions, that he was also a hitmaker. He wrote it to replace a symphony. He wrote it in a day or two. He wrote it about the danger of gold, and it went double platinum. Some songs argue with their own success. This one just smiles, and lets the flute play.